Confectionery manufacturers have a need to offer a range of different products in order to satisfy different consumers or the differing needs of consumers on different occasions.
In some circumstances, variety can be provided by offering different textures, even within a range of otherwise similar products. For example, manufacturers have offered ‘ice-cream’ versions of popular confectionery pieces. Sometimes manufacturers offer a larger dimensioned (‘chunky’) version of a familiar product.
An important consumer need is the desire for a ‘lighter’ textured product, which is not as filling as a familiar confectionery item, but which may retain the well-liked flavour profile of the original confectionery item.
One well known confectionery material which has a ‘light’ or less dense texture is meringue. This is typically made from egg white protein and sugar whipped together in the presence of water, the whipped mixture then being baked or dried to remove the moisture. This form of preparation has exclusively been performed in a strictly batch-wise manner, as this type of formulation tends to be poorly suited to continuous production.
For example, the aerated mixture tends to be physically delicate, requiring that it be placed on a solid surface for drying, which slows the effective drying rate. Since the aerated meringue mixture tends to be relatively slow to dry in any case due to its aerated structure, and since elevated drying temperatures tend to have a deleterious effect on the sugar and protein in the mixture, this demands that the residence time in a continuously operating oven become prohibitively long, e.g. in excess of one hour, for commercial production.
This in turn greatly reduces the ability of the commercial confectionery manufacturer to utilise this otherwise useful material in meeting the objective of providing a lighter texture candy bar, as such bars are predominately manufactured in a long, continuous run production environment. However, there has not hitherto been developed a formulation or process which addresses this problem.
Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to provide a formulation to allow the continuous commercial manufacture of a dried meringue confectionery material, and to provide a process for such manufacture. It is a secondary object of the invention to provide a candy bar which has a lighter texture, but which can be made at commercially feasible production rates, by incorporating said meringue material.